A Good Description of Personalized Public Education

This article does a really nice job of describing a personalized education system to replace the current one-size-fits-all model. The more research I do about this problem, the more I think personalization is the key to making sure each student is developed to their full potential. I’m going to blog more about this in the coming days.

The money section in this article is this:

Personalized education would be the engine of that new system. This change in approach would be rational and would shape virtually every aspect of schooling:

Schools would be of human scale because students and teachers need to know each other well if education is to be personalized.

Preschool education would be universal. The primary years would focus intensely on literacy and numeracy, using the arts and other subject matter as the context for learning reading and math.

Beginning in middle school, multiple educational pathways would lead to college and other postsecondary programs to prepare young people for work in a complex and changing world. A student could choose a pathway reflecting his or her interests and aspirations. Each student would play a significant role in designing the curriculum, which would be anchored in the real world, not in the abstractions of most classrooms.

There would be no “traditional” core curriculum with typical academic courses and rigid schedules in middle and high school.

Traditional classroom instruction would be minimal. Teachers would become advisers who guide students in educating themselves. They would tutor students and help them manage their time and energy.

Technology would largely replace textbooks and worksheets. It would be used innovatively to individualize education and extend the student’s reach.

Student learning would be assessed on the basis of portfolios, exhibitions, special projects and experiments, and recitals and performances—real accomplishments, not abstract test scores.

Standardized tests would be used at transitional levels of schooling only to monitor student achievement and school performance for accountability purposes commensurate with public funding.

By any measure, our education system has failed to keep that promise. Although the evidence is abundant and well known, and so need not be detailed here, consider three indisputable facts that capture the essence of the system’s failure.

First: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, has reported for decades that an average of three out of 10 seniors score “proficient” or above in reading, writing, math, and science, and their scores generally decline as they move from the 4th grade to the 12th grade.

Second: Of every 100 students who start the 9th grade, about 30 drop out, and, according to recent studies, another 35 or so graduate without being adequately prepared either for college or the modern workplace. That means that about 65 percent of the nation’s young people are not being adequately educated.

Third: The brunt of the failure falls on poor and minority children, who are on the wrong side of an unyielding achievement gap.

I am convinced we have made little or no progress in improving education because we misdiagnosed the problem at the outset and, consequently, our efforts to improve student performance have been seriously off course.

That misdiagnosis arrived in April 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk, the report of a federal commission that stunned the nation. Its major assumption was that our schools were essentially sound and that student performance had declined because we lowered our standards. To improve, we would need to raise academic standards and establish more-rigorous requirements for high school graduation and college admission.

standards-based accountability has been the dominant strategy of the school reform movement ever since.

More standardization is not what our schools need. As the Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen puts it in his book Disrupting Class, applying his ideas about “disruptive innovation” to education: “If the nation is serious about leaving no child behind, it cannot be done by standardized methods. Today’s system was designed at a time when standardization was seen as a virtue. It is an intricately interdependent system. Only an administrator suffering from virulent masochism would attempt to teach each student in the way his or her brain is wired to learn within this monolithic batch system. Schools need a new system.”